In order to allow unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to travel in civil unsegregated airspace, several technical problems must be solved. One of the most important issues is the “sense & avoid” problem: a UAV must be able to sense the presence of other aerial vehicles or objects, and if necessary, perform an autonomous and safe last instant maneuver to avoid collision. Therefore, a UAV typically comprises an air collision avoidance system, sometimes also referred to as a Sense & Avoid system. The Sense & Avoid system includes one or several sensors for sensing intruding aircrafts or objects, and collision avoidance functionality that uses the sensed data to perform a safe escape maneuver. Since the collision avoidance system is a safety enhancing system it is crucial that the data supplied to the collision avoidance functionality are of high quality in order to avoid nuisance and unsafe maneuvers.
A crucial parameter in a collision avoidance system is an entity called Time To Go (TTG), which is the calculated time to go before collision with an intruding other aerial vehicles or object. The TTG can be calculated based on data regarding the own aircraft's position and motion and data on surrounding objects, collected by the sensors of the collision avoidance system.
There are several known ways of estimating the time to go before collision with intruding aircrafts or objects. For example, it is known to use cameras for capturing consecutive images of intruding aircrafts or objects such that the aircraft or object represent themselves as target points in the images. The TTG can then be estimated based on the scale change between the target points from one image to another.
It is also well-known in the art to use different types of tracking filters adapted to estimate the time to go with a nearby aircraft from a sequence of observations about the nearby aircraft's position, typically acquired by means of radar.
However, each of the above principles for estimating time to go suffers from drawbacks. The first principle according to which time to go estimates are calculated based on scale change between target points in consecutive images suffers from the drawback that the uncertainty in the time to go estimates are high. The second principle in which time to go estimates are estimated by a tracking filter also suffers from the drawback that the uncertainty in the time to go estimates are high.